"No, that actually is true. They basically boil a pig skull, let the meat fall off, chop it up, then form and cool."

"Gross."

"Yeah, kinda."

There was a pause.

"So you tell me, genius: what's in a sausage?"

Good question. And, having called my friend on impulse, I didn't actually have a good answer handy. I tried buying some time.

"Well, it depends what kind of sausage you're talking about and where you buy it. Clearly," I add."Nice try," he said "but clearly you don't have a good answer handy. Call me back when you figure it out." And he hung up.

My

friend may have been an ass, but he was right: I needed an answer. I

did know this: the ancient meat wizards originally conceived of sausage

as a way to serve up the less appetizing parts of an animal and make

butchering as efficient as possible. In recent years though, sausage

making has become a culinary art, and, being a patron of culinary arts

(the meaty variety in particular), I realized some research was in

order.

The sausage my friend was picturing when he answered my

question was the basic pre-made stuff that you might find snuggled up

under cellophane in the meat department at your local supermarket, or

getting a wicked case of freezer burn in your grandmother's

side-by-side. But that's not the sausage I was thinking of when I asked

the question. I was thinking of the fresh, handmade varieties you can

pick up at a good butcher shop. Those tightly packed tubes of mystery

meat that taste like the meat of gods. How are they made, and why are

they so good? It turns out that the answer is simpler than you might

think. It's also probably grosser than you think, so caveat lector

(check my Latin chops out, bitches - means "reader beware" - a

variation on caveat emptor, which I learned from the Brady Bunch when I

was about 10).

Photo by flickr user chinadoll.

At its most basic, sausage is ground meat and

spices wrapped in a casing. Sounds fairly innocuous, doesn't it? Not so

much, not always. For example, most people reading this will know, even

if they've shoved the knowledge way down in a dark and scary place in

which only evil dwells, that the casings are traditionally made from

intestines. More specifically, hog, sheep, and cattle intestines. And

that, when you really think about it, is pretty gross. But what if I

told you part of the cleaning process was called sliming? Or that the

terminal section of pig intestines is called the bung? Bummed out yet?

I am. Because I while I was researching this I learned more than I

wanted to (did I really need to know that "submucosa" was a part of my

diet?), and certainly more than I'll publish here (I believe we call it

"editing for content").

But if we pretend that blood sausage

doesn't exist and that pig bladders are always thrown away (which is my

story and I'm sticking to it), the rest of the process is far less

likely to cause people to turn to vegetarianism (a good thing, that: I

don't think the world needs any more Subaru Forresters sporting "Be

Kind To Animals, Don't Eat Them" bumper stickers driving around).

Because to make the kind of sausage most of us eat, meat is ground up

with a blend of spices and other ingredients then put in an extruder.

The end of a length of casing is slipped over the output of the

extruder, and the the sausage maker presses the meat into the casing,

twisting off each individual sausage as it reaches the desired length.

Imagine a Play-Doh Fun Factory stuffed with ground pork filling up an

endless condom, and you'll get the idea.

Photo by flickr user jgiacomoni.

But all of that is

incidental to this simple fact: sausage can be as complex and delicious

as any gourmet meal you can think of, and it's all wrapped up in a

package that's portable and easy to cook: a little tubular suitcase of